"Hi, I'm a two-time Pulitzer winner who thinks its unethical to profit by talking trash about a recently deceased celebrity. So instead, I'm going to use the dead celebs fame in order to profit by telling a story about his other dead celeb friend."

JosephFinn:BTW, I'd like to note that Gene Weingarten is not the 2-bit person in this. Gene Weingarten has two, really REALLY well-deserved Pulitzers for feature writing. For instance, for Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (WARNING: this story will make you cry. I don't care if you have no soul. You will still cry.)

Yes, and Herbert Hoover moved from unparalleled success to unparalleled success before becoming president.

I have an Ebert story: Once, while on a business trip in Chicago, I stopped for a quick dinner at Lawry's. Sitting next to me was a very drunk Roger Ebert, just staring down at a hunk of prime rib. I asked him if he wanted to join me and after he did, one thing lead to another and we started drinking like Amy Winehouse at a Hole concert - or vice versa...anyway, with both of us swimming in booze, he mentioned that he was a member of the Aryan Nation and hated everyone except, well, Aryans. I was shocked and I was furious. I screamed at him to leave. He lunged for his steak knife and I wrestled it from him with a kimura lock. I then threw the seasoning salt at his face and that's actually what doctor believe caused his face cancer.

As god as my witness everything in the above story is as I remember it... except, after I went back and checked, it wasn't Chicago, it was Baton Rouge, and it was wasn't Lawry's, it was Ruth's Chris and it wasn't the Aryan Nation, it was Mensa, and it wasn't seasoning salt, it was my fist and it wasn't cancer it was a broken jaw, and it wasn't Roger Ebert, it was my brother, and he didn't have face cancer, but does have a touch of psoriasis on his left elbow.

Fano:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/04/roger-ebert-me mo ries-bad-review-zweibel.html Here's an article written by a guy he had kneecapped, then gangraped and left for dead.

"My son, Adam, was nine years old. He was at that age when he'd be looking across the dinner table at my wife, Robin, and me, and from the expression on his face you could tell he was thinking, "I can do better than these two.""

Guy seems like he might have some issues which distort his perception of others. Reading the entire thing tripped several sociopath alarms. In fact near the end i began imagining him as Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.

70 posts in and I'm going to be the first person to say i actually kind of thought it was a cute story? As for it's journalistic merits, it's soft news. It's got a teaser intro, and it got a bunch of people to read ANOTHER story about a guy who died a week ago (or at least got some people to click on it, it seems no one actually read it until about halfway down the thread here). It's got a news peg (that's a fancy thing you learn about in journalism. It's got a twist ending (better than anything by M. Knight since at least Unbreakable), it actually doesn't break the rule about not saying anything bad about a dead person (which about half of the people in the thread misread as 'not talking about dead people'). It's two pages long. Oh the humanity. If it wasn't your style, fine, but at least, for Ebert's sake, if you are going to review something, read the whole article and actually try to make your critique understandable.

And, for the second time in a couple days, I'm going to ask farkers who seem to think an article is confusing just because it doesn't lay the facts out in a straight order to go see their doctors to see if a brain tumor is interfering with their reading comprehension. That's about a fifth grade reading level there folks. If you can't handle that on Fark maybe YouTube is more your speed.

This isn't an expose about human rights abuses. It's a mildly amusing anecdote about a widely admired man. It succeeds as a mildly amusing anecdote - even if it is a little self serving.

It amazes me how many people go crazy when someone doesn't like what they like, or vice-versa. I love reading reviews, and have written many of my own over the years. Don't approach it as "Well X says this is good, so I will see it." Approach it as "Well, this person - whose opinion I generally agree with - says this is good, so I'll give it a shot. Plus I like the way they write." Spoiler alert - you'll still disagree on certain films/games/albums.

Unless that person is Armond White. That guy's just an obnoxious professional troll with thesaurus.com bookmarked on his MacBook Pro who needs to be punched hard in the nuts. Seriously, White deserves 10 times the painful cancer Ebert had, and will be missed by 100-percent fewer people.

JosephFinn:BTW, I'd like to note that Gene Weingarten is not the 2-bit person in this. Gene Weingarten has two, really REALLY well-deserved Pulitzers for feature writing. For instance, for Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (WARNING: this story will make you cry. I don't care if you have no soul. You will still cry.)

Oh my Lord.

Okay... granted, it's heartwrenching material, but that was a worthy article.

Unfortunately, that makes this particular load of tripe seem all the worse.

TheOmni:This is a bad story. I'm not sure it's about Roger Ebert. I'm not sure if it's about anything. It's pointlessly split into two pages and manages to say nothing between them. I'd criticize it further but I'll just end up copying lines from Ebert's review of North.

Not that there's nothing bad to say about Ebert, there's plenty on that front.

I cut my losses after the first page. It was pretty clear that the article was just filler, with no actual content.

In L.A. in the 80s, when I was sixteen, my buddy, also sixteen, got a job working the night shift at an all night newstand/adult bookstore (wall down the middle of the store). So of course that summer I hung out there a few nights a week between 1 and 3am. Anyway, Roger Ebert rolls up in a red Porsche, gets out wearing a tux, smoking a stogie, with a tall super hot blond on his arm and starts perusing the aisles (not the dirty ones). He bought about 3 or 4 newspapers and in general just seemed to enjoy the attention. That's all. Everyone of us regulars said jokey stuff to him, he joked back, the end.

I got a lot of non-stories like that from those days.

/that same year I played bartender at a house party for pee wee herman...

Slutter McGee:Ebert didn't like Die Hard. You can praise him all you want. But he didn't like Die Hard. Do I need to say this again: the greatest film critic of all time....didn't like Die Hard.

Everyone should feel free to take stabs at him...even if it makes them look like an ass.

Slutter McGee

not exactly a damning review...

Without the deputy chief and all that he represents, "Die Hard" would have been a more than passable thriller. With him, it's a mess, and that's a shame, because the film does contain superior special effects, impressive stunt work and good performances, especially by Rickman as the terrorist. Here's a suggestion for thrillermakers: You can't go wrong if all of the characters in your movie are at least as intelligent as most of the characters in your audience.

There are some who are willing to admit admiration for Gene and Roger (most of us). They (and me) are the ones who sit in admiration of the few who make good moovies. Gene and Roger liked and helpled us find good ones. Nuff said.

Once, late in his career, I saw Barry Bonds take such a monstrous swing at a ball that he stumbled backwards out of the batter's box and nearly fell on his ass. It was like a parody of a home run swing. If he'd actually made solid contact with the ball he probably would have hit it 500 feet, but instead he was up there weaving around like a drunken, 275-pound Little Leaguer.

I felt sorry for him, kind of like I feel sorry for this author. You can see the flop sweat all over this. It's one thing to aim at "funny yet touching" and miss; it's another thing to take point-blank aim at it with everything in your arsenal and yet repeatedly shoot yourself in the foot.

Would someone explain to me what I just read? I read it twice to try and figure out what the author's point was and how it related to Roger Ebert and I still have no farking clue. I hope to God that I never have to read anything by that moron again.

Most people commenting here are ignorant. Gene Weingarten is a great writer, and the fact that you've never heard of him demonstrates your ignorance. It was not a newspaper article, nor a blog post. It was an update to his monthly Washington Post chat. You are idiots.

Smoked:Most people commenting here are ignorant. Gene Weingarten is a great writer, and the fact that you've never heard of him demonstrates your ignorance. It was not a newspaper article, nor a blog post. It was an update to his monthly Washington Post chat. You are idiots.